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Monday, May 24, 2010

Who'd of thunk it? Given some in the museum biz traditional animosity toward all things Disney, Joe Rohde of Disney Imagineering (immortalized in stained glass in the image above) ripped through an inspiring talk on Narrative Space that highlighted "Thematic Unity" and the importance of haptic effect and sensuality in design. (And not a cute cartoon character or merchandising tie-in in sight!)

Rohde was part of an excellent session entitled "Learning from Hollywood" that was chaired by John Chiodo here in L.A. on the first day of the annual AAM (American Association of Museums) Conference. I also enjoyed the always-dynamic Tali Krakowsky's presentation on the possibilities of integrating technology and social media into the very fabric of our creative spaces --- sort of a grand "unified theory" for interactive/immersive architecture.

I'll be reporting on interesting things that pop up during my Cali trip --- so stay tuned!

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Thursday, May 20, 2010

OMSI (The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) in Portland, Oregon has long been concerned about "green design" and the choices and approaches that museums can take to create truly sustainable exhibit environments.

I'm an advisor on OMSI's NSF-funded project on Sustainability, part of which will involve creating a set of models and guidelines for the museum field in order to promote more reflective practice about "green" exhibit design. (You can download a PDF article about OMSI's progress, as well as the "working model" of the OMSI Green Exhibit Certification assessment tool via the NAME website.)

You don't necessarily need a huge shop like OMSI's at your museum, but if you don't have some minimal "internal capacity" to fix, prototype, and build at least some of your own exhibit elements and program props, how can you foster local design (which is often the greenest design) at your museum?

2) Sharing Models of Green Design Helps Everyone

Ben Fleskes, the Production Director at OMSI, shared the model of the simple math exhibit shown above. From the locally-produced metal framing materials, levelers produced in house, powder coating for durability, an exhibit idea adapted from the ASTC Exhibit Cheapbooks, a recycled (from the OMSI Shop Racks) plyboo top, and the whole thing assembled by a community volunteer, the component above has lots of nice green design approaches embedded in it.

I will certainly be encouraging the OMSI folks to include models and examples of green exhibit design from the museum field into the final sustainable exhibit design project materials.

3) Materials DO Matter

Some designers crab about sustainable design discussions (or any design discussions) degenerating into a drool-fest over the latest, coolest materials. While this is often the case, it is still important to be aware of the materials available, their use, and most importantly, their re-use.

It was clear from the shop tour, that not only are the OMSI staff extremely careful about materials (PVC is just a non-starter) they are just as thoughtful about how to reutilize or repurpose materials from old exhibits into new exhibits.

4) Involving the Community is an Integral Part of Sustainable Design

Here Ben shows off work on a ball machine prototype being developed by community volunteers using lots of creatively "scavenged" materials from the OMSI Exhibits Shop. It was clear throughout my visit to Portland how much OMSI included the community in their exhibit building efforts.

5) Green Design Includes Extensive Prototyping

Here Todd Kehoe shows us some cool nanotechnology prototypes involving reused materials that were mechanically fastened (not glued) together, so they can be easily modified. Similarly, graphics were produced using low-impact materials that can be easily changed and modified. Prototyping ultimately saves time and money by allowing for more thoughtful materials and design solutions in the final exhibit components.

6) Green Design Can be Fun!

There often seems to be a perception that sustainable exhibits need to be plain, rough-hewn affairs made of sticks and mud without a trace of color, fun, or design flair. To disprove that notion, Ben showed us the beginnings of his desk prototype (created from reused extrusions and other OMSI shop scrap by volunteers, of course!) to harness the nervous fidgeting of a worker's feet through a treadle system and transform the motion into energy to power simple office devices like lights or smart phones.

Thanks to the entire OMSI crew for helping move the conversation about sustainability and green exhibit design forward for the entire museum field!

Have some of your own green exhibit design tips or resources to share? Let us know about them in the "Comments" section below.

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Thursday, May 13, 2010

Dana Schloss is a self-described enthusiastic and curious museum nerd. She has worked as an exhibit designer and prototyper at Quatrefoil Associates, where she designed and built exhibits for history, science and children's museums. Years of freelancing and interning have given her a broad view of exhibits at many museums, including the Science Museum of Minnesota, The Franklin Institute, The Mutter Museum, The American Philosophical Society, New York Hall of Science and The Children's Museum of Manhattan. Dana also worked as a Museum Educator at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. She is a graduate of the University of the Arts program in Museum Exhibition Planning and Design. She is currently developing exhibits for the New Science Centre Project 2011 in Calgary, Alberta.

Dana was kind enough to respond to a few ExhibiTricks questions:

What’s your educational background?
I went to Sarah Lawerence College, an interdisciplinary school without majors. I ended up figuring out that what I am really interested in is how people understand science and making art about science, so I mostly took classes in science and animation. I made several animations about the history of science, mostly diseases. In my last year, my puppet teacher pointed out that my work was essentially museum exhibits filled with puppets and that I should think about getting paid for that.

What got you interested in Museums?

I spent a few years in New York building animated holiday window displays for department stores like Macy’s and Sak’s before I started building stuff for museums. After fabricating and installing things for museums for a while and being an educator at the Museum of the Moving Image, I went back to school in the Museum Exhibition Planning and Design program at the University of the Arts in Philly.

How does working with teams to create exhibits inform your design process?
Well, I love working on good teams. I know what I’m good at and I really like collaborating with people I can learn from and who bring new ideas.

I think one of my strengths--and weaknesses--is how comfortable I am with criticism. I am pretty hard on myself and pretty hard on the science center field, which can be hard for some teams to take. I'm working on being less of a perfectionist and trying to understand that some people don't hear sentiments like, "that sucks less so much than it did yesterday!" as a positive comment.

Tell us a little bit about how your tinkering informs your exhibit design work?
This question is almost impossible to answer. Tinkering is like breathing. I take things apart at meetings and build with my food at meals. It's hard for me to make a distinction between tinkering for work, tinkering for play, and tinkering because it's just who I am.

Part of the excitement of prototyping is that it reveals visitors' ideas and interests. Being authentically responsive means I get to tinker with ideas and evolve exhibits until they fit visitors' needs or they fall apart.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
I steal a lot of ideas from Make Magazine, Instructables, and maker blogs. I also get a lot of ideas from the geeky 12 year old kids that I hang out with while testing exhibits. I spend a most of my free time at the local hacker space and a newly formed local crafting space. Talking to curious and creative people is pretty energizing for me, and I like to steal their ideas, too.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing more tinkering into their exhibitions?
Do it. Testing exhibits is way easier than you think it is. A lot of more traditional interactives can be mocked-up in tape and cardboard. Most computer-based interactives can be tested with paper and pen. Prototyping doesn't have to be expensive; your recycling bins are a goldmine of good prototyping materials.

Testing an exhibit doesn’t have to be formal or serious. Assemble an approximation of the experience you’re planning and see how people interact with it. You can learn a lot just by watching people.

If you're thinking about prototyping, you should listen to Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk about Howard Moskowitz and product testing spaghetti sauce. Basically, Moskowitz upended the way that food companies find out what people want. For years and years companies had used surveys, but Moskowitz had people taste samples--basically, he prototyped spaghetti sauces. As a result, he discovered entire new categories that people wanted. No one had ever responded in that way while filling out a survey, because it's really hard to come up with a new sauce you'd love when you just have a pencil in your hand. But replace the pencil with a fork and you can help people discover that all along they really wanted a chunky spaghetti sauce.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?
I think the next frontier for science centers is more authenticity, more mess, and transactive exhibitions. For natural history museums I think it’s going back to the last frontier --- real stuff, displayed with love.

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?

Favorite Museums: The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, The City Museum in St. Louis

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?
I am currently absorbed in developing exhibits for the New Science Centre 2011 Project at the Telus World of Science in Calgary. I love it. We're developing a science center that's for playing, being creative and innovating. We're trying to make the exhibits chanegable so that the staff and visitors who use them in the future can easily evolve them for different audiences and different contexts.

It's really fun to get to explore how to create and sustain a new kind of exhibit. It's also really fun to test exhibits so early in the process. (Basically we brainstorm one day, build things the next, and test them on the weekends. Our team screens ideas before we test them but doesn't really evaluate them until afterwords. I love having less conversation and more building.)

Right now, I am coming up for air after piloting testing exbits for our Technology, Style, and Art area, which is a mash-up of art and tech experiences in a teen maker space. In about 6 weeks we quickly tested almost 50 exhibit ideas out of things like cardboard, tape, tubes and Arduinos. Some of these ideas worked really well, some of them will turn into drop-in programs and some of them were terrible and we never want to do them again.

Also, for fun I've been working on a puppet piece about the early days of hot air ballooning and an animation about bats.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?
Wow, good question. The New Science Centre 2011 project would be pretty high on the list.

I don't think that money is the obstacle to most of the things I want to do, time is really a much bigger hurdle. Time, and the number of places I can be in at once. Other dream projects include a permanent Maker Space/Tinkering School in Philly, where kids, teens, and adults could play and collaborate and build things--from the ridiculous to the innovative--out of junk. Or a storefront museum version of Radio Lab. I’d start with the bacteria exhibit I’ve always wanted to make.

I'd also love to work on more projects for smaller strange museums. I helped a bit on some early design and model-building for the Johnny Eck Museum in Baltimore [a sideshow performer in the 30s and 40s billed as the World's Amazing Half-Boy]. I’ve helped out when at the Mutter Museum when they need me. This kind of work helps me feel grounded in the museum field and so happy to be around old strange collections.

Thanks again to Dana for sharing her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers!

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Sunday, May 9, 2010

The topic of "Risk" is the thing I've been thinking about most, now that the annual Children's Museum Conference (called InterActivity) has wrapped up in beautiful St. Paul, Minnesota.

Museums of all types (not just Children's Museums) display a strange mixture of being both "risk adverse" and "good followers." Many museums and museum workers don't want to go too far out onto a limb with an idea that might not work, but everyone seems happy to adapt an idea (even one that might have originally appeared risky) that has proven successful at other institutions. It's sort of like watching a flock of penguins waiting on the edge of an ice floe poised to leap into the water, but not wanting to be the first to jump.

Speakers at InterActivity 2010 outlined both the risks and rewards of becoming more welcoming to our communities and to looking for ways to increase diversity within our institutions. Trying out risky topics and techniques for both exhibition and programmatic offerings also seemed to be a common thread.

Taking a risk in your work is often, well, a "risk", but perhaps if everyone who attended InterActivity this year could commit to trying just one "risky" approach in some aspect of their museum's operation and then sharing the results (both good or bad) we could raise the bar in the field a bit.

So send your "risky business results" via email to my address and I'll collect them into a new post to share before InterActivity 2011 in Houston!

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Thursday, May 6, 2010

Who would have thought that advent calendars could inspire exhibit design? Maybe it's not that surprising that Advent Calendars with their little doors and secret hidden treasures would be a great way to engage visitors.

As I'm here in St. Paul for the annual Children's Museum InterActivity Conference, I got to see some wonderful exhibitions yesterday at The Minnesota History Center that Dan Spock and his team had put together. Each area was rich without being overwhelming, and rewarded careful observation.

"Open House" was an especially inspiring exhibition. Essentially an interactive journey of the life of one real house in St. Paul in which 50 families lived over the past century. Nicely placed stories and objects to give you a real sense of the lives of the house's inhabitants. You can get a sense of the space from the YouTube video above.

Great stuff! And definitely worth a special trip if you're ever in the Twin Cities

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Monday, May 3, 2010

I'm off to St. Paul for the Association of Children's Museums (ACM) InterActivity Conference. While I'm there I'll be connecting with old and new friends, and presenting during the Emerging Museums Pre-Conference event, and co-hosting an evening Pecha Kucha event with Peter Exley.

If you'll be in St. Paul, please say hello. If you can't be in St. Paul, I hope to be blogging and tweeting (#IA2010) so stay tuned!

In the meantime, I thought I'd tweak one of the Children Museum world's sacred cows --- The Grocery Store exhibit, by adapting one of my favorite posts below. Enjoy!

No More Grocery Store Exhibits!

Recently, I threw a chunk or rhetorical "red meat" to a crowd I was speaking with by saying that I'd be quite happy if I never saw another kid-sized grocery store exhibit in a children's museum ever again. Given the raised eyebrows and open-mouthed stares from many in the audience I thought I'd share the top five reasons why I dislike grocery store exhibits:

2) Grocery store exhibits are unfair to museum floor staff and volunteers.
These galleries might more accurately be called "entropy exhibits" since the main activity for young visitors seems to be to madly rush about pulling every facsimile grocery store item off the shelves, shoving them into the miniature shopping carts or onto the phony checkout conveyor and then leaving. The poor floor staff and volunteers assigned to this area then, Sisyphus-like,
engage in resorting the mess left behind again and again as new visitors enter the mini store.

3) Grocery store exhibits are just creatively lazy.
When I visit a museum with one of these areas, I instinctively think, "well, they must have run out of good exhibit ideas." Despite all the high-minded rationalizations --- "the kids are learning about food groups" or "our grocery store shows visitors where milk and tomatoes actually come from..." I say if that was really what you wanted to get visitors thinking about, there are only about a dozen more entertaining and interesting ways to address those particular topics in an exhibition format than riding the tired mini grocery store warhorse once again. (Although if food groups or farm to store topics were high on your exhibit"wish list" to begin with, I'm not sure I'd want to visit with my kids in the first place.)

4) Grocery store exhibits send at least as many unintended messages as intended messages.
I'd really rather not send the message that it's alright to tear up an exhibit area and make a mess and then leave it to other people to clean up, or that shopping for food is some sort of wacky leisure activity instead of a necessity. If we really thought carefully about the ideas that kids are leaving grocery store exhibits with instead of blithely, and automatically, assuming that frenetic activity in an exhibition area equals "fun" or "learning" we might try out some different ideas.

5) Grocery store exhibits are the worst sort of craven fundraising ploys.
One of the most common reasons I hear directors defend their choice of a kid-sized grocery store exhibit is "We can easily get a sponsor for this." Believe me, after nearly 30 years in the museum business, I understand the need to fundraise, but are you trying to create unique, amazing exhibit spaces, or just sell chunks of museum real estate?

Unfortunately most museum "sacred cows" come from just the sort of "well this is the way we've always done things" or "I've heard it works amazingly well at Museum X" sort of thinking.

What do you think? Do you have some of your own favorite museum "sacred cows" you'd like to throw on the fire? Let us know in the "Comments" section below.

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